Emporia State retains Tier 1 status in national rankings

September 13, 2011

Emporia State University remains a Tier 1 Regional University in the 2012 edition of “Best Colleges,” which was released today by U.S. News & World Report.

U.S. News defines Regional Universities as institutions that offer a full range of undergraduate majors and master’s degree programs but few, if any, doctoral programs. Emporia State offers one Ph.D. program in the School of Library and Information Management.

The 2012 edition of “Best Colleges” includes 626 Regional Universities. These schools are compared only against others in their region “because, in general, they tend to draw students most heavily from surrounding states,” the report said.

The Midwest rankings included 159 public, private and proprietary schools in 12 states — Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio. Of those 159 Midwest Regional Universities, 56 are public schools.

Emporia State ranked 36 out of the 56 public schools in the Midwest region and 98 out of the total 159 schools. Of the total 159 schools, 13 were unranked.

The rankings came from a variety of statistical information from the 2009-10 school year. The information is weighted into categories that then are calculated into a final score. The categories for Regional Universities are peer assessment, graduation and retention rates, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources and alumni giving.

For the 2012 report, U.S. News used the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s changes to its basic classification.

“As a result of this revision, many colleges have switched ranking categories (from National Liberal Arts to Regional Colleges, for example, and some schools have been added to the rankings for the first time),” wrote Robert J. Morse and Samuel Flanigan in the report. “The category changes were the main explanation for the biggest movements in this year’s rankings.”

In the Midwest Region Universities, eight schools were included because of category changes. The full report is online at www.USNews.com.